This invention relates, generally, to protective headgear and, more particularly, to a jaw pad for an athletic helmet which can be interchangeably used on both the left-hand and right-hand sides of the helmet.
The typical athletic helmet consists of a rigid outer shell made of hard plastic material. Secured to the internal surface of the shell is a padding structure that is fit to the wearer's head so as to absorb the force of impact to which the helmet is subjected.
The padding structure consists of a plurality of resilient pads removably secured to the inside surface of the helmet shell. The pads are of varying shapes designed to protect specific portions of the wearer's head. Moreover, the interchangeable pads come in a range of thicknesses such that the helmet shell can accommodate different sized heads.
In order to removably secure the pads to the helmet shell, a plurality of sets of male snap members are fixed to the inner surface of the shell. Each of the resiliant pads is provided with a set of female snap members for mateably enaging one of the sets of male snap members. The pads can be simply and easily removed and replaced by "snapping-out" one pad and "snapping-in" another pad. The pads are designed to be easily removed and replaced so that the user, for example an athletic team's equipment manager, can easily replace worn or damaged pads and can replace pads of one thickness with pads of a different thickness such that the helmet can be fit to different size heads.
The known padding structure includes a pair of jaw pads arranged one each on the left-hand and right-hand sides of the shell. The jaw pads are basically U-shaped and are arranged on the earflaps of the shell below the ear holes to protect the hinge area of the wearer's jaw. A set of three male snap members is arranged on each of the left-hand and right-hand ear flaps to engage three female snap members formed on the associated jaw pad.
Because the male snap members of both the left-hand set and right-hand set are symmetrically arranged and the left-hand set is a mirror image of the right-hand set, the female snap members of the right-hand jaw pad can not engage the male snap members of the left-handset and vice versa. Therefore, when the prior art jaw pad system is used, it is necessary to have a matched set of jaw pads-one for the left-hand side of the helmet and one for the right-hand side of the helmet.
The necessity of having method sets of jaw pads results in two basic problems. First, the cost of manufacturing the padding structure is increased by the need to produce and package the different left-hand and right-hand jaw pads. Second, the maintenance of the helmet by the end user is complicated by the necessity of matching the jaw pads and is made more expensive by the necessity of purchasing and stocking the matched pair of jaw pads.